instruction

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Mobile Learning: The Teacher in Your Pocket

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

There’s a great new book out on mobile technologies in libraries and I was fortunate to have been asked to contribute a chapter on mobile learning and mobile instruction in libraries. The book is called The Handheld Library: Mobile Technology and the Librarian and it was edited by the undeniably awesome Tom Peters and Lori [...]

My critique of Value of Academic Libraries and a happy update

Sunday, April 21st, 2013

My critique of the Value of Academic Libraries initiative has just been published in OLA Quarterly (it’s the first article in the PDF). I wrote it on the fly after a desperate request for content from the Oregon Library Association President, so it’s not my most thoughtful work, but I’m pretty happy with how it [...]

Assessment on the brain

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

This has been a crazy year, full of a lot of research and activities centered around assessment. From my participation in RAILS last Spring, to my Assessment LibGuide, to my presentation at LOEX of the West, to my paper (forthcoming) and presentation (with Lisa Hinchliffe) at the Library Assessment Conference, to my just-published article in [...]

Self-efficacy in retention and how we can help build it

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

A little while back, I wrote a post about the role of narratives in our lives. The stories we tell about our lives that inform the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Those stories impact everything. Including our willingness to persist when challenged in an academic environment. And in a time where [...]

The entrepreneurial library

Thursday, November 29th, 2012

Years ago, I visited the libraries at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After lots of conversations, the one word that stuck with me was entrepreneurial. The library faculty there were a truly entrepreneurial bunch, creatively finding opportunities to improve services and raise the profile of the library through collaboration, experimentation, partnerships, grants, etc. When [...]

The devil you know in first-year instruction

Friday, August 10th, 2012

It’s pretty clear from the comments on my recent posts that many of us have a sense that the sort of information literacy instruction we’re providing is not having the impact we’d like. But even when we know that what we are doing isn’t a right fit, it can be difficult to try something new. [...]

Behavior vs. belief and changing culture

Monday, July 23rd, 2012

At LOEX of the West this summer (a fantastic conference, btw), Joan Kaplowitz did a session where she started by asking attendees what words they associate with assessment. I won’t list the litany of negative terms that came from the audience, but I will say that the most positive word used to describe assessment was [...]

Broad vs. deep in information literacy instruction

Saturday, June 30th, 2012

When I was at Norwich, my focus was often on increasing our instruction stats. My Director wanted to see us doing more instruction and being in at least two classes in every department (in addition to reaching every student through EN 101). Not bad goals at all, but over time, I realized that the focus [...]

Setting priorities

Friday, May 18th, 2012

In academic libraries, there are usually so many levels of priorities. There are the priorities of the university. There are the priorities of the library. Each unit probably has its own priorities, as does each individual. Ideally, these all sync up nicely, where an individual can show how their priorities mesh with library’s and university’s [...]

No, we can’t do it all

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

So many of us struggle with determining priorities in teaching. Few of us have a workload that would allow us to do everything we would like to do. We hear stories about embedded librarian programs, librarians who were able to co-grade student papers with a disciplinary faculty member, libraries that have co-taught entire classes, etc. [...]

Reflections on year one at PSU

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Yesterday was my one-year anniversary of working at Portland State. I’d wanted to write a post yesterday reflecting on it, but I was driving three hours (to Bend, OR) to give a four-hour preconference. Since the whole experience was accompanied by a migraine that just wouldn’t die, I crawled into bed as soon as the [...]

Classic Blunder #2 – Assuming resistance is a bad thing

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

I remember when I was in library school, a lot of people talked about librarians who were resistant to change and would try to derail your exciting and innovative projects. Often, this discussion was couched in ageist “us” (young, innovative librarians) vs. “them” (old, set-in-their-ways librarians) terms, but even when it wasn’t, the assumption was [...]

Classic blunder #1 – Let’s just try it and see what happens!

Saturday, January 28th, 2012

There are a lot of popular assumptions people make in this profession that lead us to make classic blunders. These can be assumptions about the change process, assumptions about our colleagues, and assumptions about our patrons. We can go into developing a new service or technology with the best of intentions and fail spectacularly because [...]

“I need three peer reviewed articles” or the Freshman research paper

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

For the past six and a half years, I have been teaching Freshman about peer-review and how to find peer-reviewed articles through the library (or Google Scholar). I’ve developed all sorts of activities in different disciplines to get students thinking about audience, writing style, and the format of the articles they find. And every year, [...]

Invisible goalposts, support and having a plan

Monday, October 17th, 2011

This summer, I was engaged with quite a few projects (several of which I was in charge of), but was able to make time to focus on scholarship just about every Friday. Part of that, in my opinion, is this blog. This is how I engage with the profession, share my ideas, and have professional [...]

Becoming Zen in the face of criticism

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

It’s been extremely challenging to post here regularly (though I’m getting better about it!), not because of a lack of ideas, but because of a lack of down-time. Summer came late (like mid-July!) to Portland and we’re trying to make the most of it before the days of endless gray descend. I’m lucky that I [...]

Portlandia

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

Greetings from Portland, Oregon! I’ve been wanting to post about so many things in the past two months (especially just about everything Barbara Fister has been writing over at Library Babel Fish — gosh she is insightful!), but it’s been difficult to find the time. The learning curve at my new place of work has [...]

My new job (or why all of my Oregon Trail gaming as a child might finally come in handy)

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

I’m one of those people who has a hard time waiting for people’s birthday to give them presents. Whenever I try to surprise my husband with something, I always end up telling him about it early. I can keep other people’s secrets, but I’m terrible at keeping my own. So I’ve felt like the cork [...]

Transliteracy from the perspective of an information literacy advocate

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

A colleague of mine and I have been talking about transliteracy for some time and came to very similar conclusions as David Rothman did in his smart and respectful critique. I’d thought about writing about it myself for months but two things stopped me. The first was that I thought perhaps there was something I [...]

What do they really need?

Monday, December 13th, 2010

I’m not sure if I’ve become more cynical or just more observant, but lately I feel like I’ve been seeing things through new eyes. We make so many assumptions in this profession, often based on the idea that we know what students need and want. Time and again, research has shown that we’re usually wrong. [...]

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